Creation of software applications, which includes design, development, and testing of the code, is typically an iterative process. Testing may find errors in the design and/or the development of the code. Accordingly, the design and/or development of the code are updated to correct such errors. The amount of time of such processes is, therefore, typically dependent on the size of the software application and how well such processes are performed. In addition to the debugging of the code, updates are typically made to the design and/or development to add additional features to the software application.
A number of different paradigms for the design and development of software applications have attempted to reduce the time of these processes. Such paradigms have included procedural programming, functional programming, object-oriented programming, aspect-oriented programming, and so on. Disadvantageously, designers and developers using these different paradigms have had difficulty identifying the effect(s) that an update or incorporation of an additional feature has on the existing code. In general, this comes from the high level of complexity inherent in modeling sophisticated business processes in general programming or “implementation” languages.
Specific to a business application, the purpose of such an application is to help automate business processes. A business process is a recurring pattern of interactions among human agents. Business processes evolve over time through a series of adaptations to changes in the environment. A business process is a complex adaptive system. A business application may be a model of that complex adaptive system at any point in time. One aspect of a business application is that it should be flexible enough to adapt and evolve in step with the adapting and evolving business process that it is modeling. If an application is not flexible enough to evolve it is considered to be rigid and brittle and should be replaced.
The lack of flexibility of a business application comes about because of the inherent rigidity of general programming languages when they are used to model multi-dimensional problems. In general, the problem is that each interaction of each dimension should be explicitly codified in the language. There have been some improvements to this situation starting with parameterized functions, then object-oriented programming and most recently aspect-oriented programming. None of these approaches have overcome the mechanical rigidity inherent in general purpose computing languages.